by Irwin Shaw
As the Reos rolled along the rough narrow roads of 1927 New England, sending up clouds of white dust between the stands of second-growth pine, the boys in the truck with Benjamin began to sing. Since Cohn was in the same truck, they naturally sang “Hallelujah” and “Sometimes I’m happy, sometimes I’m blue.” Benjamin sat silent, not singing, hating the songs (in lieu of hating Cohn), feeling his hair and clothes getting gritty from the dust and conscious of a sour contraction in the pit of his stomach. Many years later, as a sergeant in the infantry, sitting by the tailgate of a weapons-carrier full of men, rolling across the plains of France after St. Lô, with a khaki handkerchief across the lower part of his face to keep out the dust, he had a curious feeling that he had done all this before, had felt exactly the same during another summer, that soon adolescent, unarmed voices on the road past Avranches would start chanting, “Sing, Hallelujah—and you’ll shoo the blues away; when cares pursue you—Hallelujah—gets you through the darkest day.”
Cohn stood up between the two rows of benches, keeping his balance easily as the truck swayed from side to side, conducting the choir, swinging his arms and making pained grimaces in imitation of an orchestra leader dissatisfied with the sounds his musicians were producing. The song ended in laughter at Cohn’s clowning and he spread both his arms, still in mimicry, and said, “Rise, gentlemen, rise.”
Everybody but Benjamin stood up. Even Bryant stood up with the others, going along with the joke. Cohn looked speculatively at Benjamin, and Benjamin was afraid Cohn was going to make a joke about him, but Cohn merely smiled, then began to improvise, first humming a little to himself as the boys sat down again, then going into his own words to the tune of “Sometimes I’m Happy.”
“Sometimes I’m happy,” Cohn sang, “sometimes I’m blue. Sacco, Vanzetti, what did you do? Dear Mr. Governor, can’t you be fine, And turn the juice on some other time?”
Somehow, by humming or going fast over the rough spots, Cohn managed to make his words fit the beat of the music and he grinned at the shout of laughter that greeted his cleverness.
“Now,” he said, “all together…”
“Sometimes I’m happy…” the young voices sang over the noise of the motors. And, “Sacco, Vanzetti, what did you do?”
Only Benjamin sat silent. Everything’s a joke to that sonofabitch, he thought bitterly, knowing that all the boys in the truck would call him a sorehead from then on and not caring.
“Dear Mr. Governor, can’t you be fine, And turn the juice on some other time?”
The voices sang louder and louder as the boys learned the words, and they were bawling the song out when the trucks stopped at one o’clock in front of the post office and general store of a small village and Bryant went in to call the director of the camp.
The village green, with its bandstand, was in front of the general store, and all the boys got out and stretched their legs and sat on the grass or on the steps of the bandstand and ate the sandwiches and oranges and drank the manufactured-tasting milk from thermos jugs that had been sent along by the camp cooks with their lunches.
Bryant took a long time, and while waiting for him Cohn taught his new song to the boys from the other trucks. The village was almost deserted, since it was lunchtime, and there was only a farmer or two passing through to listen puzzledly to the strange sound of more than forty boys in camp uniforms singing, in voices that ranged from childish soprano to uncertain bass: “Sacco, Vanzetti, what did you do?”
When Bryant came out of the general store he had a ponderous, self-important look on his face, like the manager of a baseball team walking out to the mound to send a pitcher to the showers. Everybody knew, before Bryant said a word, that the news was bad. “Boys,” he said, “I’m afraid Boston’s out. Both those guys were electrocuted an hour ago. Now let’s forget it and go to Canoga and show those fellers what kind of a ball club we have playing for us this season.”
“God damn it,” Cohn said. “We shoulda just stayed home.” Profanity was punishable under the camp rules, but Bryant put his arm consolingly around Cohn’s shoulders and said, “Boris, I know exactly how you feel.”
They piled once more into the trucks and started for Canoga. Benjamin sat near the open end of the truck again, on the verge of vomiting after the thick sandwiches and the thermos-bottle milk. The knowledge that within an hour or so he would be playing a ball game, something that usually filled him with excitement, gave him no pleasure today, because he knew the rest of the team would be playing resentfully and that they would remember that he was the only one among them who had wanted to play the game. They would look for signs of smugness and triumph, and Benjamin knew that no matter how he behaved and whether anybody said anything about it or not, a good deal of their resentment would be turned against him. Hell, he thought, I haven’t got a friend in this whole lousy camp. I’m going someplace else next summer.
They lost the game that afternoon. The whole team played stodgily. Years later, when Benjamin was in college, an unusually literate backfield coach had told him, “I don’t care how much ahead you are or how good you are or how easy it is, I want players who play with passion. Without that, don’t bother to suit up. You might as well go sit in the library on Saturdays and improve your mind. You’re not going to do me or anybody else any real good out there on the field.” Federov was nineteen at the time and considerably more blasé than when he reached fifty and he had smiled secretly at the coach’s using a word like “passion” in connection with a boy’s game. But later he had understood what the coach was talking about.
At any rate, nobody, including Benjamin, was playing with passion on that August afternoon in 1927. He didn’t get a hit all day. In the eighth inning it began to rain, and he slipped and misjudged a long fly that went over his head and rolled into the woods and let in two runs that won the game for Canoga. It was the first error he had made on a fly ball all season. Nobody said anything to him when he came in from the outfield, except Bryant. “Tris Speaker,” Bryant said bitterly. Speaker was the greatest center fielder of the period and the irony was not subtle. “I’m ashamed of you. I’m putting somebody else in for you. You’re no damned good. And you’re not in the lineup against Berkeley tomorrow, either. You’re a jinx, Federov.”
What a stupid man, Benjamin thought, I didn’t realize how much he wanted to go to Boston. No wonder he’s only second string for Syracuse. He’s probably too dumb to remember the signals.
The boy who took Benjamin’s place was a pudgy fifteen-year-old named Storch, who struck out on three straight called strikes without taking his bat off his shoulder, and bobbled a grounder in the outfield to let in two more runs for Canoga.
Benjamin was still too young and too committed to victory for whatever team he played on to get any satisfaction out of Storch’s disgrace and for the rest of the day and evening he kept to himself, brooding and unhappy and wishing the season were over and that he was leaving for home that night.
The next morning he didn’t even watch the basketball game. He took a canoe out on the Canoga lake by himself and paddled out far enough so that the cries of the spectators around the court could not be heard. He lay back in the spotty sunlight and listened to the water rippling against the canoe and read The Saturday Evening Post. There was a picture of an old cowboy on the cover, listening to a Victrola with a horn. The old cowboy was holding a record marked “Dreams of Long Ago” and was crying. Inside the magazine there was a story that Benjamin read with interest. What was there to help her now? Emily asked herself rather strangely. What was to prevent her, for example, from going straight down over the hill to the gypsy camp yonder, and the violin that was calling, calling, into the dusk?
Canoga won the basketball game, too, and Bryant lost his temper with everybody. On the long trip that afternoon to Camp Berkeley, the boys were sullen and there was no singing in any of the trucks.
1964
FEDEROV SHIFTED A LITTLE closer to home plate because the sun was in hi
s eyes now. Andy Roberts was still playing, but the other third baseman had been replaced by Joe Cerrazzi, whose father ran the liquor store in town. Cerrazzi had played for West Virginia a few years before and was the best ballplayer in town, and he made Federov pay attention to the game again. Cerrazzi moved constantly, went up on his toes before each play, with his hands hanging low and loose below his knees, ready for anything. During the inning he swooped in on a bunt, which he picked up with his bare hand, throwing it underhand in the same movement to nip the runner at first base. Then in the next inning, with a man on third, he cut across in front of the shortstop on a slow roller, charged the ball, kept the runner from moving with a quick feint and threw out the batter with a clothesline peg.
“Hey, Joe,” Federov said, “what’re you wasting your time for? The Mets need you.”
“I’d rather sell booze,” Cerrazzi said. “I’m an intellectual.”
He was the first batter up in the next inning and connected squarely with the ball. It went in a screaming drive to dead center. Federov watched Michael turn and race, in what seemed like hopeless optimism, toward the fence that marked off the boundary of the field. At the last moment Michael leaped high against the fence, hitting hard against the wire and falling to his knees, but coming up with the ball. There were whistles of appreciation from the bench and from the few spectators and Cerrazzi came over and sat down next to Federov and said, “There’s the one the Mets could use. Your kid. He sure likes to win, doesn’t he?”
“It looks that way,” Federov said. He remembered his own reaction to what the coach had said about passion when he himself had been nineteen and wondered at what age he could use the word to Michael.
“Is he going to go in seriously for playing ball?” Cerrazzi asked. “I could give him a hint or two.”
“No,” Federov said. “He prefers tennis.”
“He’s right. Tennis is something you can play all your life,” Cerrazzi said, with the born athlete’s solemn lack of shame about using clichés.
Federov didn’t tell Cerrazzi that the only reason that Michael was playing baseball that afternoon was that he couldn’t get into the town’s country club because he was Jewish, or anyway half-Jewish, and the few private courts that the Jewish summer people could play on were reserved for adults on the weekends. Federov’s wife, Peggy, who wasn’t Jewish, was in a constant state of irritation about this and tried to keep Federov from inviting home friends of his who belonged to the Club, but Federov had long ago stopped worrying about what he considered the annoying but minor inconsistencies of American life. After Auschwitz, it was hard to be too deeply concerned because your son couldn’t play two hours of doubles on a Saturday afternoon. And in the arguments he had with Peggy on the subject, he defended his Gentile friends for their passivity by reminding Peggy of all the places they themselves went to which didn’t admit Negroes, despite their own theoretical absence of prejudice. “I am no longer young,” he had once written to his wife in answering a letter of hers in which she had complained about what she called “the hypocrisy” of his friends at the Club. “I do not have enough anger left for all causes. I must ration it wisely.”
Well, Joe Cerrazzi couldn’t get into the Club either. And it had nothing to do with his religion. He couldn’t get in because his father ran a liquor store. Federov wondered if Peggy would be more annoyed at being barred from playing tennis because she was married to a Jew or because of being married to a liquor salesman. I must ask her, Federov thought, the next time the damn thing comes up.
He had to squint now. There was no avoiding the sun. September was approaching and the sun was lower in the sky every afternoon. Low-sunned September, spikes hung up, vacations over, old outfielders playing their last games…
1927
ON THE MORNING OF September 1st, they were all back once more in the shed of the Fall River Line on Fulton Street. Children were being collected by parents in loud reunions, counselors were gravely accepting tips, aunts were exclaiming about how wonderful little Irving or little Patrick looked, the older boys were shaking hands with each other and promising to meet each other during the autumn, the director of the camp was beaming in the middle of the confusion because one more summer had passed without a drowning or an epidemic or poliomyelitis or an unpaid bill. The shed emptied quickly in the rush for home, but Benjamin and Louis were left standing there, because their parents had not yet come to pick them up. Finally, they were the only boys left and the director assigned Bryant to stay with them to await Mr. and Mrs. Federov’s arrival.
Bryant looked far from happy at this last assignment and neither he nor Benjamin exchanged a word with each other as they stood, a little apart, in the shed which was suddenly eerily quiet and cavernously large. Bryant had kept Benjamin off the season’s-end honor roll (Benjamin had learned this from one of the waiters who had served coffee and sandwiches at the counselors’ meeting where the votes were cast), and Benjamin had taken it hard. He had always been high up in school, more often than not first in his class, and had made every weekly honor roll all season, and he ostentatiously remained ten yards away from Bryant, wishing him bad luck in every game Syracuse played that fall, and ashamed that his enemy (he now considered Bryant as exactly that) was the witness of this unprecedented callousness on the part of his mother and father. “Look,” he said to Bryant fifteen minutes after the departure of the last of the campers, “you don’t have to wait. I know how to get home. I’ve been to New York and back from Harrison a hundred times by myself.”
“Stay where you are,” Bryant said, snapping at him. “We’re waiting for your father or mother or whatever member of your family finally remembers you’re here, if it takes all day.”
Louis stood there serenely, looking out at the river, calmly munching on caramels, although it was only nine-thirty in the morning. He had wisely kept out a box for emergencies from the last canteen night at camp.
Their parents arrived a few minutes later, both of them running. They had overslept, they said, the alarm had not gone off. Benjamin was furious with this foolish apology, especially since it was directed at Bryant and not at either Louis or himself. At least if it had been an accident or a death in the family or something important. His mother kissed him, his father embraced him and said he looked great. His mother said to Louis, “What time of the day is this to eat candy?” and kissed him ten times. His father took out a twenty-dollar bill and gave it to Bryant, who made a hypocritical show of trying to refuse it. “Take it, take it,” Benjamin’s father said, pressing the bill into Bryant’s hand. “I know how college boys can use a few extra dollars.”
Benjamin would have liked to knock the twenty dollars out of his father’s hand, but he wouldn’t be ready for gestures like that for another five years.
“I want to tell you, Mr. Federov,” Bryant said, man-to-man, “you have two wonderful boys there. Wonderful.”
Benjamin said a dirty word, under his breath, but shook hands with Bryant when Bryant came over and stuck out his hand with a false, charming smile. “It’s been a great year, Tris, old feller.” The echo of the afternoon at Canoga was, Benjamin knew, deliberate and malicious. “I hope we’re all back together again next summer.”
“Yeah,” Benjamin said. “Yeah.”
“Tris? Tris?” his father said puzzledly. “What’s that for?”
“It’s short for Tristan,” said Mrs. Federov, the ex-piano teacher. “He was a knight of the Round Table. He—well,” she hesitated puritanically over the rest of the sentence. “Well, he played around with his friend King Arthur’s wife. Her name was Guinevere.”
Israel Federov looked suspiciously at Bryant’s retreating back. “What sort of name is that,” he said, “to call a thirteen-year-old boy?”
Benjamin knew that if he had said, “The center fielder,” his father would have understood, only he would have thought it a compliment and have liked Bryant the better for it. And Benjamin didn’t want to have to explain why it wasn’t a com
pliment and the true nature of his relationship with Bryant. He didn’t want to talk about Bryant. He just wanted to go home.
For many years after, the word “betrayal,” in Benjamin’s mind, was linked with the handshake in the shed and the alarm clock that had not gone off in Harrison on the morning of September 1st, 1927.
1931–34
IT WAS THE LAST EASY summer of his boyhood and youth. His father’s partner turned out to be a thief and the business went into bankruptcy in October and the Federovs never had any money again until after the war. With the failure of his father’s business, Benjamin found himself scrambling, after school and during vacations, to get whatever jobs he could to feed himself, buy the necessary books for his courses, and help with a few dollars when he could, to keep the family going. He sold newspapers, he carried copy for the Newark Ledger, he spent a summer as a counselor in a camp in the Adirondacks, he worked as a delivery boy, and tutored backward children and performed whatever jobs were available for a hungry and inexperienced adolescent during the black years of the Depression.
When he was a freshman in college he was one of a group of students who were promised fifteen dollars apiece, plus tips, to serve as waiters on New Year’s Eve at a country club in western Pennsylvania. The boy who made the arrangements was a casual friend of Benjamin’s called Dyer, whose father was the manager of the country club. Since the golf course was closed and the tennis courts shut down for the winter, there was only a skeleton staff on duty and help for the huge party that was being held on New Year’s Eve for the members and their guests had to be collected at random, with no questions asked about previous experience at waiting on table. All they needed was a pair of black pants and a white shirt. Black bow ties and white jackets were to be supplied by Dyer’s father. The boys, fourteen in number, were to travel from the school to the country club in three borrowed cars, and they would get back late on New Year’s Day.